Tying Down The Lion (35 page)

I have to think about this. The project is a bridge spanning me and Mum, or at least the beginning of one, and, in spite of the coffee spills and doodles and crossings-out, I am proud of it. But Beate probably needs it more than we do. And afterwards, she can close the notepad and tidy it away in one of her white baskets, knowing we have all listened to her and tried to understand.

“Yes. Maybe Berlin is the right place to leave it, Mum.”

“Mind you, Jacqueline, it is a shame we will not have the chocolates.”

“True. Not to mention having to put together another project. It might have to be blooming Sandie Shaw after all.”

Mum is woozy now, so I give her a quick kiss, trying not to trespass on the grenade.

“By the way, just a final thought, how about I call you Eleora now?”

“Mum is best,” she whispers. Or
Mutti
?”

“I’ll stick with Mum, thanks. And by the way, your roots need doing.”

“No they don’t,” she says, her voice woozy. “I shall damn well grow out the blonde now.”

When I am back with the others, Dad hands me a dog-eared copy of
Petticoat
with a coffee stain on the cover. The pages are falling apart and the fashions are out of date, but I am actually holding the sacred magazine in my hands.

“Mum spotted it in the waiting-room,” Dad says, coming back into the ward. “And even before she was drugged up to the eyeballs, she insisted I steal it for you.”

During the long wait while they operate on Mum, I clutch the sacred
Petticoat
and think about the instalment of
The Girl in the Iron Collar
that will be in this week’s
Mandy
, as well as the Blitz Sisters, about to stumble upon an unexploded bomb, not to mention the repressed Red Indian outcast from Granite Gulch and the two Australians who inherit a dilapidated steamboat.

I lay the
Petticoat
aside. It is designed for “the new young woman”, but she is Tuesday, Peter’s utterly grown-up model wife, a woman of the future. Lawks, is he still drilling the holes for that serving-hatch?

“Ma, did we bring those insurance papers? The ones that pay for hospitals and that?” Dad asks Grandma.

“Haven’t the foggiest, son. I remember lining the cage with a load of papers. Blood and sand, I do hope Elsie hasn’t put her Neville in with my Deborah. It’s the sort of thing her ladyship would do, you know. Stan will soon put her right though. He knows my Deborah’s heart’s too weak for all that shenanigans.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Dad says. “I’ll go and look in the car right now.”

“No!” Victor and I shout.

“Over my dead body,” Grandma whispers in my ear.

“Dad, hold the bus a minute. Will you tell us all about your motorbike and side-car?” Victor asks. “I need to take my mind off Mum’s operation.”

Strike-a-light, seven-year-old boys can save the day too.

Dad turns a bit misty-eyed. Once he starts, it’s like trying to turn off the fuzzy noise on a faulty transistor. He remembers Mum banging on the prison doors with her waters breaking when she went into labour with me after flagging down the ninety-three bus to get there.

“The Governor said it was the first time anyone had ever begged to be let into the place,” Dad says. “Roared to the hospital in no time, we did. Wasn’t too easy stuffing her in the side-car though. Christ how I miss that bike.”

Whether he is misty with the memory of my birth or his bike, I am not sure, but it keeps his mind off the car and the rest of us breathe again. Grandma passes round the last of her Poppets and gets out her knitting. Hopefully not another twin-set for me.

“I’ve run out of fags. Jaqueline, got any cash left, love?” Dad asks, biting his nails.

Victor manages to unearth a few spare coins from T-K’s duffle-bag, just enough to tide Dad over for now. And then? The Fab-Four only knows. The car is dead, but thankfully Mum is not. In a minute, Dad will go outside and have a look at his dream that is not there. We will all have to walk back to Claude Rains, and he’ll be smiling even less than before. Then we will have to telephone Beate’s flat and ask if we can stay until Mum is well again. Help.

I tell Victor to distract Dad for a bit longer by bringing up the World Cup and, if necessary, steering the conversation round to the Grand Prix.

“You’re not a bad lass, are you?” Grandma says.

“Not too bad, I suppose.”

“Well, you come from good stock, duck. Damn good stock. On your father’s side of course.”

Grandma may love me, even though I am half-foreign, but I suppose she can never completely love Mum, because foreign or not, Mum stole her son. That was where she went wrong.

Holidays never turn out how you think they will. For example, T-K has changed his name to Johannes Freedom-Fighter. He can clear a pit of rattlesnakes in one leap. Good for him. Perhaps he knows how to get us home. But however we manage to get there and however long it takes, we all know it will be waiting. In the meantime, we must make a temporary home out of the wrecked car or the hospital waiting-room, or even back in the monochrome flat in Schillerpark. Anywhere will do.

If a spider’s web is broken, the spider starts spinning again straightaway. The silk thread keeps unravelling. The work never ends until the spider dies. He rebuilds anywhere he can, throwing out the dragline to get the work underway for the millionth time. Once he sets to work on the new web, he has already forgotten the one that’s gone.

I pick up my notepad for the last time. There is one final paragraph to add.

***

Contrasts Project

Ida Siekmann, 48, Bernauer Strasse

Home

Early one August morning in 1961, when men arrived to brick up her ground-floor windows and front-door, Ida Siekmann had to make a decision.

She used to cross the border daily just by opening her front door and setting foot on the pavement. But earlier that month, when a man painted a line on the ground, fifty families fled Bernauer Strasse before it became a wall.

Ida made her choice.

She threw her most treasured possessions and her bedding from the third-floor window, and leapt out.

Ida died on the way to the hospital, the first victim of the Wall.

If people are caught up in madness that they cannot fight, it can crush them. But if they puzzle out how to crawl away from the ruins, after hundreds of twists and turns they might find their way home. If the sign-posts are confusing, they turn back and start again, or they try a different way.

If they survive, they might need the strength that ties down lions or the patience to wait for the moon to turn the tide, but they keep on looking. Home can be anywhere. All they have to do is find it.

About the Author

Joanna was born in 1960 and grew up in Hayes, Middlesex. She was too shy to speak to anyone outside the family, but she invented stories about them all the time.

When a perceptive nursery school teacher let her spend playtimes with a stack of books in the classroom, Joanna taught herself to read and has hidden in corners that turn into many other worlds ever since.

Today she lives near Stroud, Gloucestershire. While pretending to be her husband’s secretary and learning all about life from her three daughters, Joanna’s love of the written word has led her to become a writer. All kinds of literary and commercial magazines and anthologies have included her prizewinning short stories.

***

As part of her degree course, which included the study of East Germany, Joanna lived in West Germany for a year, where she taught English. All the people she met showered her with kindness and were keen to share their experiences of both the Second World War and the Cold War in which they were immersed. Most of all, they were enchanted that an English girl could, despite past and present hostilities, choose to live in their country, learn their language and try to understand how the ordinary person felt.

***

Tying Down The Lion
was inspired by “A Temporary Uprooting”, a short story about the Bishop family. After Joanna had written it, they kept insisting on their own novel. The only way to silence Nell was to write it.